The National Assembly (Assemblée nationale) is the lower house of the bicameral Parliament of France under the Fifth Republic, which created it in its current form in 1958. It sits at the Palais Bourbon in Paris. Its 577 deputies are elected to five-year terms in single-member constituencies by a two-round vote, and it alone can bring down a government through a motion of no confidence. The current 17th legislature was elected in June and July 2024, and Yaël Braun-Pivet has presided over the chamber since 2022.

France's official work on unidentified phenomena has historically taken place outside parliament, at GEIPAN, the unit of the national space agency CNES that has collected and investigated sighting reports since its predecessor was founded in 1977. On June 29, 2026, deputies Arnaud Saint-Martin of La France insoumise and Pierre Henriet of Horizons brought the subject into the building with a four-hour public colloquium in the Salle Victor-Hugo, titled "La recherche sur les phénomènes aérospatiaux non identifiés (PAN) au-delà des fantasmes" ("Research on unidentified aerospace phenomena beyond the fantasies"). Franceinfo described it as the first time UFOs had been addressed at the Palais Bourbon. It was a colloquium organized by two members rather than an official committee hearing, although English-language coverage often called it a hearing.

The organizers presented it as a deliberate contrast with the United States, where the Department of War had published more than 160 previously classified UFO documents about six weeks earlier. Rather than "give the illusion that something is being hidden," Henriet told the Assembly's LCP channel, the deputies wanted to show that the phenomena can be studied rationally. Saint-Martin, a sociologist of science, said the subject draws reactions from astonishment to mockery, and noted that while 89 percent of reports worldwide come from the United States, France has its own cases. Henriet, a mathematician and former president of the parliament's science and technology assessment office, asked how the state organizes research into unexplained observations.

GEIPAN's director, Frédéric Courtade, said the service's mission centers on informing the public, including through its open archives, and that neither GEIPAN nor CNES conducts research on unexplained cases, according to franceinfo. GEIPAN expert Gilles Munsch spoke on the limits of witness testimony and instrument data. Data researcher Michael Vaillant called for international standards to support a "new science" of the phenomena, and anthropologist Pierre Lagrange argued that the real problem was an obsession with finding the irrational. LCP listed representatives of the Ministry of the Armed Forces, crisis-management author Sylvain Maisonneuve and the Sigma2 commission of the French aeronautics association 3AF among the invited participants.

Available accounts report no formal resolution, report or recommendation from the colloquium. Its significance is institutional: for the first time, members of the French legislature examined unidentified aerospace phenomena inside the Palais Bourbon, and they did so by placing GEIPAN's civil, public case work at the center of the discussion as France's answer to the American disclosure debate.